Twitter posts

Twitter and Facebook are the two powerhouses in social media right now. There isn’t a day I watch television without these two being mentioned. It’s a pretty big deal in the public’s eyes. But there is one company that has been missing out on social media opportunities for far too long — you might have heard of it: the mighty Google. Big G can’t get hop on the social media bandwagon. Orkut has faded from existence in the States. Jaiku is dead(ish). Open Social has gone nowhere. Buzz is an unfinished product that has made a mess. That search deal with Twitter hasn’t really produced anything interesting…

Four or five years ago, a single mentality dominated the world of web startups: build a service, amass as many users as you could and then – and only then – either figure out a way to make money, or simply get acquired. Then 2009 happened: the economy tanked, the advertising biz took a nosedive and nobody was quite sure what to do. Venture capital funds dried up, and startups that had coasted on business plans that amounted to “eventually,we’ll work something out” suddenly ran out of money. Part of the reason for this was a desire on the part of many Web 2.0 services to remain ad-free. It’s not that they…

I’m not sure what I would do these days without Twitter. I mean, if I don’t know what some people are doing or what they are eating for lunch, how can I make it though the day? Thankfully, Twitter lets me know all of this, but is it on the decline? What will I do with my free time now? PCWorld reports that numbers in Twitter land are significantly dropping. A study conducted by Barracuda Networks in December of 2009, looked at 19 million Twitter users and made assumptions from their research. The one assumption they made was: A “True” Twitter-er has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people and had…

If you’re already a member of Foursquare, you know damn well it’s Foursquare Day, and have probably already been ‘playing’ for a couple hours. Good luck, and godspeed. For the rest of you, let me tell you all about the most bizarre alternate reality game you’ve never played, and why it’s important. I’m a pretty cheap guy, and as such do not yet own a smartphone. My phone is an LG 8100, if you must know: takes MiniSD for memory (MicroSD’s completely useless and defunct cousin), looks like it was designed by Rubbermaid, and has suffered a veritable gauntlet of alternative applications: hammer, doorstop,…

About a year ago, the blogosphere was all-a-twitter about a clever parody service named Flutter that shortened micro-blogging down to 26 characters. But now, in one of those funny twists of Web 2.0, we’re getting a real service named Flutter – but rather than shrinking Twitter messages even further, it simply tells you who from your social networks is physically close by. Launched by Mashed-In, Flutter connects with your Twitter, Facebook and Linked-In friends and, using geo-aware tech in mobile phones, lets you know whenever they check in or update something from nearby. While this naturally…

Does anyone remember Jaiku? Many Twitter users today don’t know this, but Jaiku was far superior to Twitter in numerous ways. It was better in every single way, and it deserved to be the product that everyone was talking about today. It still, to this day, shocks me as to how Jaiku allowed Twitter to take over. But the reason that this happened was simple: the company failed to open itself up to third-party developers. Even after I urged the owners of Jaiku to open itself up to compete with Twitter, the company failed to do so. Twitter was announcing new APIs and incentives to developers while Jaiku continued…

You can now add one more to the list of reasons that Bing doesn’t suck: Microsoft is now integrating up-to-the-minute search results from real-time services like Twitter into Bing. Using a new feature called social search, users of Bing will soon also see near real-time results – very useful if you’re searching for news on a natural disaster, a local event, or if you just want to know what’s going on at a given moment in time. While the feature hasn’t been rolled out to all users yet, Microsoft say they it will be available to most in the U.S. shortly. You will also be able to see which topics are creating…

And nosy tourists and stalkers are pleased! At today’s Chirp conference, Twitter’s Evan Williams announced that Twitter will soon add a location feature to Twitter called “Points of Interest”. The feature, as Twitter’s Evan Williams put it, is “a way to see where a tweet is coming from but also a way to read all the tweets coming from specific nearby landmarks.”…

For all the chatter about the inanity of Twitter, ultimately it is a pretty amazing resource of what people are thinking and doing at any give time. And any time you hear ‘pretty amazing resource’, you can bet that people will try and monetize that somehow! Google was the first of the big search players to index Twitter results, and now they are introducing a timeline feature. While there are numerous ways to see what people are thinking right now, what the new timeline feature does is present users with a graphical chart representing how much people are talking about a subject over time. Clicking…

The rise and fall of the blog is a heavily discussed topic on the Internet. Many are quick to claim that social media is killing blogs; that blogs are no longer important. But this isn’t the case. The truth of the matter is that blogs have done far more harm to themselves than anything Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, or any other social media site could have ever done. And, if anything, these sites provide more exposure and opportunities for bloggers. Destruction From Within But all that doesn’t take away from the fact that blog growth has been slowing. There are also quite a few theories…